Can carbon budgets divert the world from dangerous climate change?

A few weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its Summary for Policymakers, the latest, best estimate of our climate problem. It’s not a pretty picture. The IPCC is brutally honest about where it can’t provide certainty, such as the exact extent of specific kinds of extreme weather in the future. But the report expresses “near certainty” that humans are causing climate change [ that’s science-speak for “we know this” ] and that we’re heading for devastating consequences.

The IPCC provides some guidance on what we need to do, broadly speaking. The key idea is the carbon budget (which Climate Central recently summarised nicely). In short, we humans can “safely” put only so much carbon into the environment and maintain decent odds of holding warming to 2 degrees. I credit activist Bill McKibben for making this idea mainstream by writing a powerful piece in Rolling Stone last year.Read More…